This disclosure relates generally to animated avatars designed to simulate personality characteristics for entertainment and other applications, and, more particularly, to devices, systems, and methods adapted to capture personality and behavioral profile characteristics of a person and to provide an interactive experience with an animated avatar where the avatar simulates personality and behavioral profile characteristics based on at least a portion of the captured personality and behavioral profile characteristics.
The broad notion of interacting with an artificial intelligence continues to be contemplated and studied. For example, efforts to create virtual agents or automated attendants for commercial use in reception, call center, online presence, and customer service applications have resulted in text-centric (e.g. automated online chat help services) and verbal/voice-centric (e.g. automated call center services) with improved capabilities of accurately receiving and responding to user/customer queries. Service providers of these virtual agents or automated attendants routinely advertise that these kinds of artificial intelligence technologies consistently outperform their human counterparts for the tasks for which they are designed. The effectiveness of these technologies is often measured in terms of the percentage of calls or interactions that result in sales, the accuracy/resolution rate of correctly identifying the query and its corresponding answer, the rate of delivering brand-complementing and legally compliant (i.e. good) answers, the response time between question presented and answer delivered, the number of question-answer pairs, the percentage of calls where the call-query attempt was abandoned, and other similar information delivery-centric metrics.
Virtual agent and automated attendant systems typically do not include flexibility to provide different personality styles, or if they do, such flexibility is limited to pre-selecting personality modes from a discrete range of selectable “personalities” for presentation to the target users. Each different “personality” might have a different tone of voice according to desired gender, speech cadence or rate of word delivery, and other selectable pre-programmed parameters.
Similarly, such agent and attendant systems typically do not have an ability to assimilate new information that modifies future responses. That is, most of these systems do not have capabilities to learn. However, some progress may have been made to incorporate processes whereby the agent or attendant learns by storing queries and information identified as new, then triggers a process by which the new information is selectably (i.e. through human intervention/action) retained and incorporated or discarded.
Further, such agent and attendant systems typically do not involve animated avatars, or if they do, the avatars are animated in very limited ways. Most often the animation is simply to reinforce the presence of an active system that is doing something to address the user's query, or to simply signal that the agent/attendant is in a particular state such as ready or delivering a response or thinking or turned-off/unavailable.
Gaming systems use animated avatars more comprehensively than virtual agent and automated attendant systems. Gaming systems increasingly employ avatars as central aspects of the gaming experience. In fighting-oriented games, for example, the user views the virtual environment through the eyes of an avatar, commonly viewing the user's virtual arms, appendages, weapons, equipment, and so forth. And the user views other users' virtual realizations (or avatars) in the gaming/virtual environment. The gaming industry continues to focus on avatar-centric techniques whereby the avatars, controlled by, and representing, the human users, take on increasingly life-like and realistic behaviors. For example, gaze control, whether user controlled or automated (i.e. sentient gaze), has been recognized as an important aspect of avatar-to-avatar communications, in addition to vocal and other visual queues and communications means.
The avatars used in gaming systems increasingly incorporate more options for the user to customize. Head gear, camouflage, color combinations, weapon systems, names, nicknames, and numerous other individually selectable options allow the user to create a particularly unique avatar or character. In many games, the user is able to modify, improve or upgrade, and add customized features to their in-game character which carryover from each game session to the next game session, thereby allowing the user to continue changing and developing features and characteristics of the user's created character.
The avatars used in virtual world simulation environments, such as Second Life, for example, may be customized into a desired “digital persona” that may or may not resemble the user in real life. Such avatars are typically cartoon-like representations created from a user's selections of various pre-determined or canned selectable options, similar to the gamer's selections of modifications and so forth when changing and adding features to their in-game character.
A more realistic avatar experience has been proposed whereby a typical cartoon-like avatar is animated to mimic (or shadow) the movements and motion of a user whose movements and motions are sensed by a camera/sensor system. The “Avatar Kinect” system may be such a system, as an evolution of Microsoft's Xbox product. The system uses a Kinect camera to animate a typical cartoon-like avatar so as to provide more realistic avatar movements and motion, with software/applications to place the avatar in various environments, situations, and circumstances.
An even more realistic avatar experience has been proposed, in concept, whereby 3D modeling and 2D video might be combined in real time computationally to create a near photo quality, very realistic avatar performance. In concept, such a system might use camera sensors (like Kinect) to capture the movements and motion of a user, then combine the information with a photograph or 2D video of a real person to create an avatar performance. The avatar performance would be very realistic since the appearance of the avatar is synthesized from a photograph or 2D video of the real person, and the avatar's movements and motion is synthesized from movements and motion of the user captured by the camera sensors. In concept, such a system could be used whereby an actor (or user) might read and perform a script which is then synthesized by the system into a corresponding avatar performance, with the avatar appearing as a very realistic/photographically accurate depiction of a different real person that was previously photographed. In such a system, however, particular aspects of the movements and motions of the avatar would theoretically track those of the actor/user/player rather than reflect the particular aspects that may distinguish similar movements and motions of the person previously photographed, unless, of course, the actor/user/player and the person previously photographed were the same person.
Neither advanced avatar systems that provide a very realistic avatar experience, such as providing a photo-realistic avatar having full-body and facial animations, nor artificial intelligence systems for simulating and providing for interaction with such animated avatars have been developed. Moreover, the subcomponent devices, systems, and methods for designing and developing and implementing such systems are not available, or are not available for practical, affordable use, or have limitations that have not yet been overcome or adequately addressed by engineers, inventors, and commercialization efforts. What is needed, therefore, are new and improved devices, systems, and methods directed to the development and implementation of improved animated avatars with improved capabilities and features.